Joe Biden has today blasted the Supreme Court’s ‘un-American’ anti-abortion ruling after senior judges scrapped the constitutional right to abortion in the US.
In an address at the White House, the President said today was ‘a sad day for the court and the country’ and called the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade – and making terminations illegal for millions of American women – ‘wrong, extreme and out of touch’.
Accusing the court of ‘expressly taking away a constitution right that is so fundamental to so many Americans’, Biden vowed the fight over abortion rights ‘is not over’ and said his administration will do everything in its power to combat efforts to restrict women from travelling to other states to obtain abortions.
It comes as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas called on fellow jurists to overturn laws protecting gay marriage and contraception.
The Supreme Court has ended constitutional protections for abortion that have been in place for nearly 50 years by deciding to overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v Wade ruling and hand back power to individual states to decide whether or not to permit the procedure.
The vote was 5-4 to scrap Roe, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing separately to say he would have upheld the Mississippi law but not taken the additional step of erasing the precedent altogether. At the same time, the court voted 6-3 to uphold a Mississippi law that bans abortions after 15 weeks, with very few medical exceptions.
The justices held that the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that allowed abortions performed before a fetus would be viable outside the womb – between 24 and 28 weeks of pregnancy – was wrongly decided because the U.S. Constitution makes no specific mention of abortion rights.
Roe v. Wade was centered around ‘Jane Roe’, a pseudonym for Norma McCorvey, a single mother pregnant for the third time, who wanted an abortion. She sued the Dallas attorney general Henry Wade over a Texas law that made it a crime to terminate a pregnancy except in cases of rape or incest, or when the mother’s life was in danger – arguing that the law infringed on her constitutional rights.
‘The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision,’ Conservative Justice Samuel Alito, who was nominated to the court in 2006 by George W Bush, wrote in the ruling on Friday.
The ruling means that individual states now have the power to decide on whether to ban abortion. The Guttmacher Institute, a pro-choice research group, has said that 26 states are ‘certain or likely’ to ban abortion now.
A total of 13 states – Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Wyoming – have adopted so-called ‘trigger laws’ that will ban abortion virtually immediately.
The decision means that women with unwanted pregnancies in large swathes of America will now face the choice of traveling to another state where the procedure remains legal and available, buying abortion pills online or having a potentially dangerous illegal abortion.
